| Frank Furness |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT FRANK FURNESS | |
| 1839 births | |
| furness, frank | |
| 1912 deaths | |
| american architects | |
| army medal of honor recipients | |
| people from philadelphia | |
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Furness was born in Philadelphia . His father, William Furness, was a prominent Unitarian minister, and his brother, Horace Furness , was an outstanding Shakespeare scholar; Furness, however, did not attend a university and apparently did not travel to Europe. He is remembered for his eclectic, often idiosyncratically scaled buildings and for his influence on Louis Sullivan and the acclaimed 20th theater designer William Harold Lee . Although much of Furness' architectural designs were uniquely his own creation, Gothic Revival was a prevailing theme throughout. Furness began his architectural training in the office of John Fraser, Philadelphia, in the 1850s. He participated in the Beaux-Arts-inspired atelier of Richard Morris Hunt , New York, from 1859 to 1861 and again in 1865. During the Civil War he served as Captain and commander of Company F, 6th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry ("Rush's Lancers"), receiving a Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery at the Battle Of Trevilian Station , Virginia, on June 12, 1864—the only American architect to receive this honor. Furness considered himself Hunt’s apprentice and was influenced by Hunt’s dynamic personality and accomplished, elegant buildings. He was also influenced by the architectural concepts of Viollet-le-Duc and John Ruskin . Louis Sullivan worked briefly as a draftsman in Furness’s office, and his use of decorative organic motifs can be traced, at least in part, to Furness. During his career, Furness designed over four hundred buildings including banks, churches, synagogues, railway stations for the Pennsylvania and Baltimore & Ohio railroads, and numerous stone mansions in Philadelphia and along Philadelphia's Main Line, as well as a handful of commissioned houses at the New Jersey seashore, Washington, D.C., New York state, and Chicago, Illinois. Furness died on June 27, 1912, and is buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia , Pennsylvania . Following decades of neglect, in which many of his most important buildings were destroyed, there was a revival of interest in Furness’s work in mid-twentieth century. Robert Venturi in ''Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture'' wrote, not unadmiringly, of the Philadelphia Clearing House: “... it is an almost insane short story of a castle on a city street.” Some buildings by Furness, all located in Philadelphia: ]]
Buildings by Furness, not in Philadelphia:
Three adjacent buildings in Wilmington, Delaware are reputed to be the largest grouping of Furness-designed railroad buildings:
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